The red priest

There are some pieces of music so blunted by over-familiarity we can’t really hear them properly anymore. Bach’s Air on the G String, Pachelbel’s Canon, Stairway to Heaven. Music damaged by overuse. Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons isn’t quite on that list yet but it is perilously close. With more than 1000 recordings and counting, it’s in danger of becoming our next musical cliché.

This week we’ll try to rescue the world’s most popular set of violin concertos and their composer, the enigmatic Baroque violin master Antonio Vivaldi. A little later we’ll hear an electro-ambient recomposition of The Four Seasons by young British composer Max Richter, with other pieces including Vivaldi's Stabat Mater by Europa Galante directed by Fabio Biondi, and the Concerto in d minor RV 242 with Il Pomo d’Oro and violinist Dmitry Sinkovsky.

But we begin with a step back in time to the early 18th century in Venice with Joanna Tondys, a harpsichord player and musicologist with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra. They’re about to present a series of concerts that will take us beyond Le quattro stagioni, with violin concertos by Vivaldi, Avison and Corelli chosen by their guest soloist, the Russian violin player Dmitry Sinkovsky.

It’s a chance for us to discover the man behind the world’s most recorded classical work - the maestro di violino who enjoyed rock star status in his day only to die in complete obscurity; the man of faith who trained for ten years to become a Roman Catholic priest before stepping aside one year after ordination; the composer almost completely forgotten until his rediscovery in the 1950s, known in his day across Europe as The Red Priest, Antonio Vivaldi.